Dear Lifehacker,
The cost of hard drives are still rising like crazy. Is there any way I can still buy them for a reasonable price? Or are there any other ways I can upgrade my storage cheaply or even for free?

Sincerely,
Disk Poor

Dear DP,

Actually, yes! If you want cheap hard drives you're going to have to make some sort of sacrifice, but you can definitely still find them at a reasonable price. Additionally, cloud storage is remarkably cheap at the moment and you can get a ton of it without paying anything at all. First let's tackle hard drives and then we'll look at how you can supplement your current situation with a bunch of free space in the cloud.

How to Get Some Reasonably-Priced Hard Drives

You need to know where to look. One option currently available is joining a shopping club like Costco, buying an external drive, and either using it or harvesting the less-expensive drive inside. You won't just be getting a slightly cheaper drive. Currently Costco sells a 2TB Seagate external for $99 and a 3TB Hitachi external for $150. On Amazon, the Seagate will run you $130 and the Hitachi isn't even available (although you can get a newer version for $280, which is significantly more). These prices are likely lower because Costco is selling older models, so if you look for those elsewhere you can often find cheaper prices. Pay attention to sites like Woot! and DealNews to find companies trying to get rid of the extra stock of old units.

To sum it all up, look for older models of external drives in places you wouldn't expect. Of course, there is always the option of buying used or refurbished for a cheaper price as well (but that probably goes without saying).

There is one other option, too. If you're putting together a network-attached storage (NAS) device, traditionally you'd buy or build the NAS and then purchase an array of hard drives to put in it. This has always been cheaper. These days it is not. For example, this Netgear ReadyNAS hasn't seen much of a price hike at all and comes with 4TB of storage. That unit currently costs $700 with disks and $500 without. In general you'll pay around $100 per 1TB hard drive at the time of this writing, so buying this particular unit with storage will save you $200. This won't be the case with everything, but check ready-to-use storage devices to see if the cost is more reasonable. You may be able to save quite a bit of money this way. That said, you probably don't want to be building a NAS right now. Although there are reasonable options, unless one of those options is exactly what you want you're limiting yourself significantly. Better to tide yourself over with a little extra storage and build later when prices drop again.

Note: These are the prices and options available at the time of this writing. This all could very well change so do keep that in mind.

How to Get Free (and Cheap) Cloud Storage

If you want to upgrade your storage but don't want to pay for it, the cloud is the place to be. If you can offer up a little cash, you can get even more storage for far less than you'd pay for a hard drive. First, here are a bunch of free options:

In some ways it can feel like you're collecting pennies with free cloud storage, but a few offer large amounts of space at no cost and reasonable paid plans as well. Alternatively you can look at paying for a web hosting service that offers unlimited storage for, generally, a very low monthly fee. HostGator, for example, offers unlimited storage for a little less than $4 per month. Most hosts have a policy that you can only use their storage space for web purposes and not file backup or other uses, but most of the time it'll go unnoticed (depending on what you're uploading) and some (like Dreamhost) actually offer the option of using at least some of your space for backup/storage purposes.

If you need a place to store your files it's definitely not a great time to go shopping for more space, but if you take a good look at what's out there you can still get by without emptying your wallet.

Love,
Lifehacker

You can follow Adam Dachis, the author of this post, on Twitter
, Google+
, and Facebook
. Twitter's the best way to contact him, too.